Friday, May 1, 2009

Robert Pattinson is in Vancouver gearing up for "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," the blood-sucking sequel to Catherine Hardwicke's wildly successful teen-vampire-romance movie, "Twilight." And like love the second time around, it's not the same.

"It's strange because it already feels much more of a slick machine," Pattinson says of the film, which is being directed by Chris Weitz. "The first one we had such a young cast. Everybody was friends. It was fun. There was nothing like what it is now. Now there are people waiting outside the hotels all the time. We have security. It's crazy."

And Pattinson hasn't even started yet. He's been in Vancouver for three weeks pacing up and down his hotel room while the shoot has been under way because "I like to get some kind of momentum going in my own process, so when I actually turn up on the set I should know vaguely what I'm talking about."

Pattinson, whose almost ethereal beauty has been a key part of "Twilight's" success, is nothing if not self-deprecating. He delivers his thoughts in a stuttering, half-finished manner distantly related to another British heartthrob, Hugh Grant. He also seems to share Grant's well-known discomfort with attention. In fact, the only respite from all the screaming women recently has been movie sets.

"I feel like most of the time for the past few months I'm pretty much working every time I get out of the house, working or not, so I might as well be working," he says. "I'm always in work mode. Just in case someone comes up to you, you've got to have your game face on."

Probably none of this will change with the release of his newest film, Paul Morrison's "Little Ashes" - if for no other reason than few of his fans will see it. Shot before "Twilight" made Pattinson a tousle-haired poster boy, the film, set primarily in the 1920s, is about the relationship between Spanish poet-playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca (Javier Beltran) and Surrealist gadfly Salvador Dali (Pattinson). What begins as a mutual admiration society of up-and-coming artists becomes much, much more. Speculation has it that Lorca and Dali were, or almost became, lovers. The film goes there, to a degree that made Pattinson very uncomfortable until he actually saw it.

"I guess I was expecting things to be more graphic," Pattinson says. "There's so much shame involved, and the thing I was really worried about was trying to show the madness of it."

In fact, the only aspect of the film that seems to trouble him now is the not-at-all convincing aging of Dali to 30 or so. Pattinson was 21 when he made the film, and he looks it. Ironically, he faces the opposite problem with the "Twilight" series. His character, Edward, never ages, so he has to look like an undead teenager through the three sequels he's contractually obligated to appear in.

"I think all of them will be done within a year and half," he says. "The whole thing is about change and aging. So it would look ridiculous if I'm playing 17 when I look 35."

Which is another way of saying that Pattinson is unconcerned about being locked into author Stephenie Meyer's franchise in the same way that the Harry Potter cast has been in theirs. It won't last that long.

Then it will be interesting to see in which direction Pattinson decides to go. No doubt his fans would prefer him to continue looking good, but he appears to have other ideas. He talks about one part he's considering in which he speaks a foreign language he doesn't know and another in which he plays "an incredibly abusive, terrifying character." He certainly seems to like playing characters who are tormented, or at least struggling with who they are.

"I try to choose things which are something that I'm going through in my life," he says. "Jobs that will help me realize or add something about myself. I don't really think about it in terms of a career." {sbox}